I’ve learned there’s a real paradox at the heart of what it means to be a leader (that most of us have to learn the hard way):

The deeper work of leading has nothing to do with effort, and everything to do with living from the inside out.

Leadership is sold and told and podcasted as pushing harder, performing better, producing more, hustling your ass off. Yada yada yada. We’re conditioned to believe that clarity will finally arrive if we can just work harder, faster, stronger, longer, etc.

But, the older I get, and the more coaching conversations I have, the more convinced I am that the opposite is true.

Leadership isn’t about looking outside for answers. It’s about getting honest by looking inside.

Honesty, not in the technical sense being factually accurate, but in the soulful sense of being truly aligned. Honesty that invites us back into conversation with ourselves about the fears, doubts, shadows, limits, and heartfelt longings.

You know, the kind of honesty that refuses to let us hide behind our busyness or our brilliance.

This is why the hardest work any of us will ever do as a leader is not strategic. It’s spiritual.

And, by “spiritual,” I don’t mean religious. I mean the inner work, the soul work, that quietly shapes everyone and everything we touch.

Organizations do not break because leaders fail to think. They break because leaders fail to slow down and look inward.

I can hear this inner fracture long before I see it:

• In the hesitation before a hard truth.

• In the tension held silently in the room.

• In teams that adjust themselves around the leader’s unspoken fears.

• In decisions that look good on paper but hollow and shallow in practice.

Most of us have learned how to project strength. It’s the rare soul who has learned how to face their own inner weather with brutal, beautiful honesty.

And, so, without realizing it, we begin to outsource clarity. We ask our team to name what we will not. We wait for circumstances to give us permission to act. We hope the next meeting, the next retreat, the next strategy will save us from the conversation we’ve been avoiding with ourselves.

The hard truth is that clarity never comes from the outside. It comes from the places within us that we are most afraid to visit.

This is why the greatest bottleneck in any organization is not competence or capital. Nope. It’s unspoken fear.

Fear of being wrong.
Fear of being misrepresented.
Fear of being insufficient.
Fear of losing what you’ve built.
Fear of what we can’t control. Fear of (you fill in the blank).

Most leaders run out of courage long before they run out of ideas. Not because they’re weak, but because courage requires vulnerability. And, vulnerability requires the one thing many leaders have been conditioned to avoid: returning to the truth of who we really are.

So as we turn toward 2026, let me offer three questions, not as a checklist, but as invitations. These aren’t questions to rush through. They are questions to sit with. Questions that work on us as much as we work on them.

1. What am I avoiding?

Not what’s urgent.
Not what’s expected.
But, the quiet truth within you that keeps whispering, “This really matters.”

Avoidance is never about the thing itself.
It’s about the part of us that is afraid to step into a larger, truer version of who we are.

2. Where am I pretending?

Pretending is a subtle fracture, a breach between our inner life and our outer performance.

Parker Palmer once wrote, “A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light.”

Pretending is how shadow spreads.

Pretending that we’re fine.
Pretending the team is aligned.
Pretending the cost we’re carrying is manageable.

Truth is not the enemy of leadership.
Truth is the condition for wholeness.

3. What does my team actually need from me that I’ve been hesitant to give?

This question always reveals something tender: a fear, a boundary, a longing, a truth.

Often, what your team needs most is the very thing you’ve been withholding from yourself - your presence, your clarity, your courage, your permission to lead from your center rather than from your fear.

These questions won’t fix anything overnight.
They’re not meant to.
They are meant to force you to look within.

And, when you and I find the courage to make that kind of investment, it spills over into every relationship in our lives, and everything else we touch.

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Here is the quiet hope at the heart of all this:

You are not called to be perfect. You are called to be whole.

Wholeness is the well from which all good leadership flows. Wholeness is what allows us to stand in our truth without demanding that others stand in it, too. Wholeness is what allows us to lead with courage instead of control. Wholeness is what allows us to return to ourselves again and again, even when the world keeps asking us to perform.

Hope grows wherever truth is welcomed.

Begin there.
Return there often.

And, let your leadership flow from the quiet, honest place inside you that has been waiting to be heard.

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Steve Knox | Atlanta, GA

\\\ Thanks as always for reading. I hope you print this off and sit with it a long while. You’re worth it. Put pent to paper. Get outside and go for a walk, and look within. Until next time, be honest, be you. Much love.